London’s National Gallery becomes home to a slice of Amsterdam’s red light district from Wednesday, with the opening of the installation The Hoerengracht by US artists Ed and Nancy Kienholz.
The work is a recreation of a stretch of the Dutch capital’s red light district, featuring life-size mannequins of prostitutes in glowing red windows. The sleazy street finds itself in the illustrious company of Rembrandts, Titians and Botticellis, as the free museum houses what it dubs ‘one of the greatest collections of Western European painting in the world’, dating from the 13th to the 19th century.
Keen to make a link with the rest of its collection, the museum bills the fragment of 1980s Amsterdam as “Recalling in particular the Dutch masters of the 17th century, which are strongly represented in the National Gallery.”
The title means ‘the whore’s canal’ – not actually a genuine Amsterdam street name, but apparently a play on words intended to recall the name a much grander canal in the city, the Herengracht.
Video: Curator Colin Wiggins introduces Kienholz: The Hoerengracht. Featuring interviews with artist Nancy Kienholz.
Pimps and whores
Based on photographs taken by the artists, the detailed walk-in model of the Amsterdam street invites visitors to peer into the windows where prostitutes sit waiting for clients. In an interview with the National Gallery, Nancy Kienholz says that during the years the installation took to make, from 1983 to 1988, she grew “sick of pimps and whores”. But her self-taught husband, who died in 1994, maintained that what he found most inspiring about Amsterdam’s red light district was simply “the light”.
Amsterdam is home to the famous Kienholz installation The Beanery, a 1965 recreation of a Californian bar. It is part of the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum’s permanent collection, though it is no longer on display since the museum closed for a lengthy refurbishment.
Photo: A man looks over the art installation The Hoerengracht at the National Gallery in London - ANP.
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